Improving communication with victims about Restorative Justice
The most recent British Crime survey (2018/19) identified less than 5% of victims of crime recall being offered the opportunity of Restorative Justice. Understanding that some people will carry out their own research to access Restorative Justice, Why me? have carried out work to help them.
We used a volunteer to play the part of a victim and to try and find information about Restorative Justice in their locality, and developed 7 criteria for each Police and Crime Commissioner area. These criteria covered issues such as. Was it easy it to find information about Restorative Justice? Was there an explanation about Restorative Justice? and were there case study examples? We googled ‘Restorative Justice’ and the name of their PCC area as the starting point for the research. There are other ways that people may seek out this information but we felt this was a realistic starting point for the research.
A summary of our findings is below:
Each Police and Crime Commissioner was sent a detailed report of our findings and they were invited to make changes to improve the information available to victims of crime. We have subsequently reviewed the PCC web sites to see if changes have been made. We were pleased to see that 25 out of the 41 PCC areas had made changes since we published our findings.
It was especially nice to get positive feedback for our work:
I hope you would agree that the Norfolk and Suffolk pages for Restorative Justice are a vast improvement on the limited information that was on there previously, and hopefully they are now better at informing and promoting Restorative Justice to victims
Nicola Bayliss. Restorative Justice Hub administrator, Norfolk and Suffolk Constabulary
Any changes that help victims find out about restorative justice has to be beneficial – we are delighted that the work of our volunteer has led to these benefits. We hope our framework will continue to be used to review the information available for victims.
Lucy Jaffe, Director of Why me?